The power of the book

I'm a librarian, so I can't go long without talking about books.

There's an feature in Publisher's Weekly called, "Why I Write." One week, it featured author Karl Marlantes, who is also a Vietnam veteran. He writes about how he was verbally attacked by a group of students and how a girlfriend left him because he was a marine. He said, "I’ve wanted to reach out to those people on the other side of the chasm who delivered the wound of misunderstanding. I wanted to be understood."

In my last post, I wrote about how civilians can cause PTSD.  I want to believe that most civilians don't realize they're inflicting these wounds of misunderstanding. They don't know they are causing more pain and damage than the shrapnel in my husband's leg.

It's not limited to civilians vs. veterans. When it comes to war, there's no shortage of misunderstanding. So much of my husband and I learning to live together again revolves around this misunderstanding. (If you speak militaryize, this is called reintegration.) Obviously, I don't understand combat. Sgt. K doesn't understand that time actually passed at home while he was gone. He doesn't understand what it was like for me to run our household by myself. He doesn't understand how scared I was.

We'll never fully understand each other. But admitting you don't understand opens your mind and heart to other points of view. I've always relied on books to show me the world and in a different way and give me comfort.  (I tried learning about the soldier's viewpoint by following Sgt. K around the apartment and asking him, "How do you feel? How do you feel?" According to him, that sort of behavior is annoying.)

So I'm going to start including book reviews in this blog because, like Marlantes, I believe books have the power to build bridges over chasms.